Serial networks are in wide use today across a number of industries. For example, many transportation vehicles today use Controller Area Network Bus (CAN Bus) networks, to convey messages between the different components of a vehicle (e.g., the transmission, brakes, windshield wipers, etc.).
Despite the prevalence of serial networks, most serial networks lack any security paradigm at all. For example, in the case of CAN Bus today, any device can be easily connected to the network without any authentication or authorization at all. Full-fledged authentication and authorization techniques, such as 802.11x, are also too expensive and time consuming to run on a CAN Bus network.